You know, a big part of purity culture is an inability to cope with your own mistakes, because in your mind, there’s no way to bounce back from serious errors. You can’t just apologize for doing something Problematic™ and then try not to do it again, because then you’re just Bad, so you’ve gotta prove that whatever you did was never bad to begin with. That you’re still Good and therefore did not actually do anything wrong.
So it kind of irks me when I see people acting like ‘purity culture’ is pointing out mistakes or debating about the implications of various actions.
That’s not purity culture, that’s normal culture. Purity culture is getting so overwhelmed at the prospect of ‘being bad’ that you can’t even cope with it and your only recourse is to fight against the implication tooth and nail, as well as the other, more widely understood issue of people refusing to let anyone else grow or change. Because the conceit of purity is that deep down, you’re either virtuous or evil. So there’s no room for forgiveness or for personal growth.
That’s also why you see it cropping up in social circles all over the political spectrum. Because it’s a fallacy that anyone can fall into as long as they have actual morals. It’s based in a belief that morality is a matter of innate nature, not active choices. Regardless of what your values may be.
This literally sums up what it took me a LOT of therapy to figure out, and real fucking well, too.
1. How do you define explicit? Does this mean no depictions of child abuse, even for the purpose of telling a story about how wrong it is and showing a victim’s recovery? Can younger teens have realistic sexual encounters in stories so long as nothing is shown on page, or is it wrong to imply explicit goings-on even if they’re not depicted? Where, exactly, do we draw the line between heavy petting and sex? Can a character have a wet dream or masturbate? Can a character think about sex in detail, even if they’re not depicted having it? I’m not trying to be difficult: I’m just trying to make it clear that what you’re proposing, even when you phrase it simply, is inherently difficult to implement. Stories would have to be vetted and actively moderated, a massive undertaking that AO3 isn’t equipped to manage, and any such process would still ultimately hinge on individual judgement, which means you’d still have people dissatisfied with the outcome.
2. Teenagers who choose to ignore age-ratings and warnings for the material they consume are responsible for their own experience beyond that point: it is not the job of authors or the website to say, “Okay, we know this content is explicitly meant for adults, but let’s make it less adulty just in case a teenager gets in here.” You can’t protect people from their own bad judgement and its consequences without making their lack of responsibility someone else’s responsibility, which is decidedly unfair.
3. Abusers groom victims with a wide range of material and arguments, and have done so long before the existence of AO3. Whenever this happens, we blame the abuser, not whatever story they used to justify themselves. This is also why, when murderers or other criminals take their inspiration from crime fiction novels or psychologically darker works, as has happened on multiple occasions, we blame the criminals, not their taste in fiction. Locking down on what can be written about child abuse won’t get rid of paedophiles, but it will make things more difficult for victims who use fanfic as catharsis.
Here’s the thing: tagging works on AO3 is how we protect vulnerable fans, by giving them tools to navigate away from distressing themes or content. Taking something away from one person so its mere existence doesn’t upset someone who was never going to read it anyway isn’t a protective act, but a judgemental and dismissive one. To use an analogy, there are plenty of people in the world with deathly nut allergies, but that doesn’t mean we ban an entire food group: it means we label things that have nuts in them, even trace amounts, so that nobody gets hurt. Do accidents still happen? Yes! Are some people assholes about food allergies and dietary restrictions? Yes! But does that mean the solution is to ban nuts entirely? No! And it’s the same with fanfic.
it is responsible, and the mark of a good audience, to critique problematic elements in the media we consume. For example, I love gothic lit – but a lot of it is incredibly sexist and racist. I can acknowledge that these elements are a problem and objectionable while still enjoying the piece for a multitude of other reasons. I can also say to myself “if I ever want to write my own gothic lit, here are some elements I should avoid.” Or, if I do want to tackle the issues of racism and sexism in my future gothic lit, then I can say “I will avoid writing in a way which implicitly or explicitly condones racism or sexism, while still emulating the praiseworthy elements of gothic lit.”
In essence, the fundamentals of intersectional media critique is this: “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators.” By rethinking these elements, I don’t mean utterly doing away with them, but rethinking how we approach them and how we read them.
We enter purity culture when our statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators,” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media].” The implication here is that, if one wants to be a good person, one should avoid [x media], because to do otherwise is to either implicitly or explicitly condone everything in [x media]. This type of attitude towards media is very common in conservative religious circles.
It moves fully into censorship when the statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media]” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore nobody can consume or create [x media] for any reason.” Those who break this rule are seen as evil and shunned. This type of attitude toward media is very common in fundamentalist circles.
A culture of censorship is the natural outcome of purity culture, because purity culture by its very nature seeks purity until even the whisper of objectionable content, in any context, is suppressed.
I would wager a guess that many people who are against anti culture are familiar with either these toxic conservative or fundamentalist attitudes towards media, and we are alarmed by their striking similarity with antis’ attitudes towards media. It is most certainly why I am against anti culture.
I saw some #discourse go by about how adults shouldn’t be in fandom writing about younger characters because it’s uncomfortable and gross to younger people to have adults ‘thinking about them’ in romantic/sexual terms.
1, This is not a restriction that any writers in any other venue have to deal with, wtf, or the entire YA genre would be banished; 2, Excuse you, children of Tumblr, no one is thinking about you.
If other people in fandom are older than you, by definition, they have been your age. When fans write about younger characters, we’re not peering through a keyhole at young people now and creeping on them.
We are drawing on our own experiences, thoughts, feelings and memories of what it was like when we were that age.
No one has the right to ask older writers to cut themselves off from their own past just because young’uns don’t want to acknowledge that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, all of them, were also young once. I’m 41, but I remember vividly what it was like to be 14. If I write a high school AU, it’s about my high school experience, even if I were to set it in the present day and decorate it with some (probably comically out of touch) Stuff The Kids Are Into Now. If I write a high school AU with sex, it’s because I remember that too! I’m not thinking about kids today, why would I– I have my own experiences to draw on. And honestly, sometimes there are things about being young that you don’t really understand until you’re much older and have some perspective– and that’s worth writing about.
If someone is genuinely a creeper, you’ll know, because they’ll ask you questions about you. But people who aren’t even directly interacting with you, who are just expressing themselves in fiction, are not a threat to you, and it’s not creepy for them to draw on their own experiences and their own past to write about younger characters.
OMG THIS
I’m honestly so frustrated with the rallying cry of these brats being “I don’t want someone getting off on me/my trauma/my sexuality” bc who the fuck are you? what flavor of narcissistic do you have to be to become convinced that the writing of someone who has never met you and has zero interest in meeting you is obviously about you specifically, I don’t fucking get it!
antis, this is not about you. none of this has ever been about you. I know it’s hard to process, the possibility that something might be entirely unconnected and unrelated to your shit life, but try to understand. you are not, in fact, the center of everyone’s universe. you, as an individual, are largely irrelevant to most people whose work you consume. just because it resembles you does not mean it is you. if you have trouble comprehending this, maybe inform a parent or guardian so someone more capable can take responsibility for your media consumption.
By popular request, and explanation of the term “Social Justice Calvinism”
Social Justice Calvinism, like regular Calvinism, revolves around the idea that human society is so steeped in sin that, not only is it inherently irredeemable, but almost everyone involved is essentially damned (to hell, in the case of real Calvinism, to … I dunno being bad, I guess, in the case of Social Justice Calvinism).
Similarly to real Calvinism, Social Justice Calvinism allows for a small, elect group of people who are miraculously able to rise above the morass of evil that is human society (in real Calvinism this is due to G-d’s will, in Social Justice Calvinism, this comes as a result of their overwhelming moral superiority).
As in real Calvinism, nobody knows who the elect of Social Justice Calvinism are, but they are identified by certain signs (in the case of real Calvinism these signs include prosperity, in Social Justice Calvinism, these signs are things like using trigger warnings or sharing photo sets of queer people of color).
Like real Calvinists, Social Justice Calvinists tend to shun and loudly denounce much of the society that they see as inherently corrupt so as to demonstrate (as much to themselves as to everyone else) that they are likely to be members of the elect. However, because membership in the elect is impossible to determine, a Social Justice Calvinists are often wracked by guilt and anxiety as to whether or not they are actually members of the elect.
Finally, and most importantly, much of Social Justice Calvinism’s appeal comes from its goal of challenging a corrupt and oppressive power structure, and its hints of moral clarity. Social Justice Calvinism so especially frustrating because the things that are being fought for are so important (see I’m one of the elect). As with salvation and prosperity in real Calvinism, many of the signs of goals and signs of the Social Justice Calvinist elect are actually quite desirable, but unfortunately they come at the price of believing that nearly everyone, up to and including you, is damned.
… wow, everything I’ve ever thought about The Discourse in a neat post. OP you’re a blessing.
we could probably have a long debate about the fact that social justice calvinists come from the US and US society was basically born out of calvinism…
When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.
There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.
But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.
You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.
It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”
Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.
Still call it out and question it ….
Bruh. No. Listen. Call out what people do now, absolutely. If they haven’t changed, call them out on their record. This post is explicitly not about people who HAVEN’T changed. What this post IS saying is, if someone is making an effort to be a good person, don’t go digging around in their past for evidence that they were once for what they’re now against, or once against what they’re now for, as “proof” of what they “really think,” because people’s opinions and beliefs can change.
The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.
If someone has changed for the better, don’t harass them about what they were like before they fuckin’ changed. That’s shitty and it needs to stop.
i jst thank fuck every day I wasn’t allowed on the internet from the ages of 11-16 because if my old journals are anything to go by i was a far right wing brainwashed child
not to sound like a baby boomer or some other bullshit but the internet really has given children access to things they absolutely should not see. i just heard my ten year old brother make a daddy joke. this really has to stop.
like i’m not joking. i’m like. just so angry i can’t articulate it right now but i’m so upset, especially with adults/older teenagers who egg children on in making jokes far beyond their age because they think it’s funny.
Not only that, but they look up their favorite shows and see porn of their favorite characters
^ This point is crucial. This is not as simply avoided as “don’t like don’t read/watch” disclaimers advise and there is not adequate safeguarding against children accessing sexually explicit material even so much as third-party websites that require a user to agree that they are over the age of 18.
~ * WHICH IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS. * ~
Not J-Random-Person-On-Tumblr-or-Ao3-or-YouTube. The child’s parents.
And I am saying this as a) a parent involved in assorted fandoms with b) two children of various ages who are c) also involved in assorted age-appropriate fannish activities. We fan together. I critique and edit my eldest son’s Transformers/Loud House fanfic. I help my youngest son design some of his Pixel-stuff skins. We decided mutually which YouTubers they were allowed to watch. We play games together, read many of the same comics, buy each other Funko Pops and Nerf weapons, squee over many of the same fannish things – not all, but many, because I have grown up things that I’m interested in and they have not-grown-up-things that they’re interested in and there the twain does not meet. Because I’m their mother and it’s my responsibility to monitor what they get into and up to online as much as it’s my responsibility to make sure they don’t play in the middle of a four-way highway.
It is not the responsibility of random strangers on the internet to monitor your child’s online activities. It’s just not. And it’s not even remotely reasonable to expect them to do so.
Parental content filters are a thing. Use them.Don’t buy your children M-Rated video games and then clutch your pearls about it. Pay attention to what they’re reading, drawing, watching, and doing online. This is literally your job as a parent.
And also? Don’t act like someone else is doing something wrong by being an adult on the internet. Because they’re not and behaving like an adult in adult-oriented fandom spaces is only to be expected. 18+ Only warnings exist for a reason. M-Ratings exist for a reason. Do Not Interact If You’re A Minor warnings exist for a reason. And it’s not the fault of the adults who employ them properly if a minor chooses to ignore them. That child’s parents should be monitoring their activities and teaching them to respect those boundaries.
I really think that antishipping is a movement that’s gaining ground with the younger & newer arrivals to fandom spaces; a kind of ‘cool trend’, so to speak. In aggregate, antishipping culture is beautifully constructed to be particularly appealing to teenage or college-age people – and especially American people – who are marginalized, oppressed, often social outcasts in real life and often under-educated about their own marginalized identity, and I kind of wanted to get into why.
a brain still growing – until the age of 22-25, the frontal lobe of the brain does not finish development. the frontal lobe handles higher reasoning skills and complex problem-solving. Thus: the growing mind is particularly prone to incomplete reasoning, black and white thinking, and total empathy failure, making it hard for those under 25 to fully comprehend the impact of their actions, sympathize with others, or tackle social problems with nuance. Truly comprehending that others come from entirely different worldviews or have entirely different experiences and that being different doesn’t make them wrong and that most deep-seated problems need complex solutions that require nuance tends to come with this final brain growth. (Not always, of course. but often.)
escaping religious/Christian fundamentalist tenets but not their mindset: for a religion supposedly based on forgiveness, organized Christianity is not very forgiving. Everyone is a sinner & a single sin is enough to doom you to eternal hellfire, if you don’t do the right thing you’ll face Judgement in heaven/your salvation is always uncertain, and sinners must be cast out from your midst: the moral/communal purity that organized Christianity often demands can take years to deprogram (and this is not to mention the gender essentialism, homophobia/queerphobia, and anti-sex/anti-kink messages, accompanied by a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism to discourage self-education on these subjects!) teens just breaking away from this toxicity are especially unequipped to untangle themselves & tend to take the same purity standards with them to a more liberal cause instead (such as enforcing ‘social justice’ in shipping), with a side-order of internalized, unexamined anti-lgbt/sex/kink/etc rhetoric that dovetails rather neatly with exclusionist rhetoric.
the particularly adolescent vulnerability to peer pressure (the need to belong & the fear of being ostracized): teens are particularly inclined to be influenced by friendships and maintaining social ties. antishipping is a highly cohesive, insular culture with enforced rules of conduct, striking clear in/out lines & engaging heavily in use of peer pressure. antishippers are encouraged to break ties with those who don’t conform to their rules of conduct, so existing friends are pressured to become antishippers themselves or risk losing their friendsgroup. once ‘in’, friends will abandon you for not keeping the party line & persecution of outsiders is encouraged, further strengthening the need to conform.
to stop antishipping is to lose your entire social media community/support structure and potentially endure a hate-mob of your former associates. In other words: it’s easy to become an anti in order to keep your friends and almost impossible to quit without losing everything, and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of social structure.
an American (and to a lesser degree, western European) post 9/11 cultural shift from prioritizing personal freedom to prioritizing communal safety; those under the age of 20 were 3 or younger or not yet born when the shift happened. antishipping prioritizes communal ‘safety’ (‘bad’, ‘dangerous’, or ‘inappropriate’ things must never be mentioned to protect people from hearing about them and being either corrupted or harmed) over personal freedom (allowing ‘bad’/’dangerous’ things to be discussed, and it is up to the individual to personally decide what content to avoid).
of course, all of this is conjecture based on my own experiences and observations, and it’s not a set of rules – just circumstances that I believe absolutely encourage young fandom members to end up falling headfirst into antishipping and either never notice how hurtful it is or never get the courage to leave it behind. And I think there’s a lot more the popularity/prevalence of antishipping today, but this post is already longer than I meant it to be.
(I always go light on racism when i talk about antishipping because while antis frequently accuse shippers of racism, it’s disingenuous to class racism as the same kind of oppression as lgbt+-phobia & misogyny, particularly in America – they’re related, but not the same. Centering non-white (and especially black) voices does not get the same focus as centering lgbt and women’s voices in fandom, and I think it’s easy to dismiss legitimate charges of racism as ‘anti bullshit’ when we class all these types of marginalization together.)
it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.
I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).
tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:
the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture
with a side order of valuing safety over freedom
b/c you’ve always had freedom of information
but you’ve never known a sense of security
thanks to lifelong internet access
paired with post-9/11 paranoia.
add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking
never being taught how to think critically, and
zero education on sex of any kind, and
viola: anti-shippers.
someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.
Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).
it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:
tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access
tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity
tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references
tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.
this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.
even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.
the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.
tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships
Anyway.
I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.
fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.
(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)
*if you figure out who it is, kindly be a decent person and leave them the hell alone.
In
America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world, it’s a
fact. ~
Marlene Dietrich
What I hate is that OP also makes a similar black and white argument. In that it ignores the reality that pornographic content does effect our minds and how we objectify things. If someone consumes incestuous, romanticized rape fic, it does over time make that more acceptable in their heads. If someone likes, sees out, and consumes hardcore pornography of women being brutalized, it makes them more likely to objectify women and see women as less than human (just look at incels). The study I mention is about midway through the article. Now what this basically means is that while by and large, sexism and watching porn don’t go hand in hand, it does show that men who are sexist and violent become MORE SO by consuming content that normalizes it. This is very, very bad. This is how we get incels. This is how we get murderous incels. We don’t have studies on fanfiction but if you think about it, written porn is not all that different from visual.
We do have some degree of responsibility when it comes to the content we produce. We just do. What we put out into the world does effect our society and normalize certain attitudes and that’s really, really dangerous. That doesn’t mean go harass every author ever. That doesn’t mean authors should never ever write problematic content. But I do think there’s a big issue with just saying: just let people write romanticized incestuous rape abuse fic it’s fine. Cuz. It’s not really. It helps normalize a destructive world view for people. I’m just really not into the line of thinking that everything is hunky dory.
Again cuz this is the internet and no one is going to read the nuance of this – please note that the point isn’t that this content normalizes that behavior for everyone. It normalizes it for people already inclined towards that disturbing morality. And that’s a big fucking deal. We don’t need people feeling emboldened to act on those attitudes.
And no, I don’t have a solution. I just wanted to add some god damn nuance to this discussion cuz everyone is like: no rules or all rules and like. you’re all wrong lol
I’ve started replies to this ask twice now and abandoned them because they got overly specific in taking apart this argument. sorry for the lateness of this that resulted from it.
I too am all about nuance. this post is not the most nuanced post I’ve written because it was addressing a very specific aspect of anti-shipping per an ask. If you really are interested in nuanced discussions about this stuff, I have a few tags related to nuance that you might enjoy reading through.
[tw for discussions of csa, pornography*, misogyny, rape, and incest.]
That said: your basic premise seems flawed to me for a few reasons, but I think it’s because you were trying to make one argument and accidentally made another. I believe that you’re making this addition at least partially in good faith, so I would like to address it as I can.
Your comparison of mainstream porn audiences and fanfiction audiences is nonequivalent in scale.
mainstream porn has thousands of times as many consumers as even wildly popular fanworks do, so the potential for serious social damage is significantly different.
the audiences are also different: many, if not most, fanworks are by and for people who are marginalized or silenced; mainstream porn is mostly aimed at (cis) men. fanworks that have problematic elements are more likely to be wrestling with the fear or trauma of being a victim/potential victim of these kinds of relationships. Mainstream porn is playing into an existing social balance that reinforces the cultural message that the expected viewer has power over (perceived) women.
the number of misogynists who are culturally unchallenged in their misogyny is much higher than the number of people who think that abuse/rape/csa are literally okay irl. your imaginary incest rape fan who is reinforced in their beliefs by fanfic is a comparative strawman to the misogynist who is reinforced in his beliefs by mainstream porn.
Further, your mention of ‘incels’ who have resorted to violence to take their hatred out on women in mass shootings, softly implying that incest rapefic fans are liable to do the same if denied access to real life family members to sexually assault, is disingenuous: I guarantee you the incest rapefic fan has not spend their whole lives being told by every cultural message that they are owed a family member to sexually assault the way an incel cis (white) man has been told his whole life that he’s owed a woman. (and porn didn’t drive these men to violence – their own sense of entitlement did.)
now that I have addressed what your argument seemed to actually say …
I think you meant more to point out that both porn that shows abusiveness towards women and incestuous rapefic are dealing with issues of consent, and you are concerned that both can reinforce toxic messages about consent if they portray situations that lack proper consent as positive experiences.
and on that point, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong.
Americans of all genders are often severely under-educated about informed consent to sex. (below examples use ‘men’ and ‘women’ b/c of how we still assume binary genders in our social messaging, but they affect nonbinary people too.)
in general, the attitude that men should chase women, women should play ‘hard to get’, and that women put up an initial resistance against men showing interest in them to test their interest level or increase their interest is still in the US cultural ether.
the idea that men are owed a woman, that women should eventually give in because of being owed to men – that’s still a thing.
the idea that it’s sexy and desirable to be chased by a man and to have him persist until you love him back is still a thing.
the idea that anything but a strict, straightforward ‘no’ counts as refusing sex is still a thing.
the idea that ‘no’ really means ‘maybe later’ is still a thing.
and plenty more besides.
and with these messages existing in real life, they also exist in mainstream fiction. the there’s plenty of examples of questionable consent being portrayed as a positive experience in mainstream media – obvious, long-standing examples of such tropes being put out into the mainstream by women for women being 50SoG, which was itself a fanfic for Twilight. But it’s also action adventure movies, and romcoms, and fratboy movies, and everyday marketing, and porn aimed at straight men, and much, much more.
but which came first: lack of education about healthy, equal consent or popular fiction about lack of healthy, equal consent? isn’t each reinforcing the other?
when people who are on the (so to speak) wrong end of these consent issues – the ones being told that being coerced into sex is the healthy, hot thing to want and experience, which most of transformative fandom is made up of – wrestle with those consent issues in fiction, are they the cause of the problem, or the symptom? or both? why do women/perceived women enjoy or create romance stories featuring these elements? do we blame the people enjoying these stories, or the culture that reinforces the notion that these things are desirable?
and
how much of an impact do transformative fanworks featuring abuse/dubcon/noncon really have on the general consciousness of consent, compared with all these other cultural messages? especially given that we have such a strong tagging culture, which essentially encourages creators to call themselves out for the problematic elements of their works before someone stumbles on them by accident? if a fanfic treats a story about rape as a sexy, good-times experience, but tags it ‘rape/noncon’, is anyone going to be duped into thinking that it was any less rape?
and finally: wouldn’t it be more productive to address the consent issues in society by educating about what true, informed consent looks like, rather than to try to eliminate every depiction of problematic consent from the internet?
here’s some further reading regarding fandom, questionable morality in fanworks, and social responsibility:
– because fandom doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we need to consider why fandom does what it does and its role in society at large, not just within its microcosm
– what’s worse – the story that has a warning for ‘coercion/dubcon’ or the one with coerced sex in it, but no warning for it? why?
hope this gives you some interesting food for thought.
(*side note: the porn industry has its problems, but as I’m more concerned with the safety and livelihood of the workers involved with it, this is not a condemnation of porn as a whole – only its playing into existing cultural misogyny for money. (fix the cultural misogyny and the porn will change too, imho.))
What other people ship, read, or write is NOT YOUR CONCERN or JOB TO STOP IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT.
I really haven’t seen this argument around much, but a big part of the shame of being a survivor–any kind of survivor, of things small and big–is dealing with the part of the abuse YOU ENJOYED. Now, some people go reactive and explode here, and say, “fuck you there is nothing here I enjoyed this is all wrong you’re blaming the victim.” Which is not what I am doing. To have enjoyed a part of it doesn’t mean it wasn’t abuse or you deserved it or it wasn’t bad enough therefore you deserve no compassion, or whatever. But many people stay stuck there, and in staying stuck there, they keep rejecting the part of themselves that enjoyed it and thus stay stuck in the shame.
What do I mean by “enjoyed a part of it”? A non-comprehensive example:
– you liked being groomed
– you liked the attention of an adult, and having an adult give you the time of day for once
– you liked the part that someone thought you were good for something
– you liked the part where you could do something for a person you loved (many abusers work this)
– you happened to orgasm during a rape because of the purely physical stimulation
– you were terrified of how he scared you, but you felt safe from the world under the wing of someone so aggressive and scary
You can insert your own. None of the above “romanticize” what happened or mean that what happened wasn’t abuse, or wasn’t horrible, or you deserve no help for your trauma, or whatever.
But maybe as a survivor you need to make a story about, “you know, I did have a piece of agency there, I wasn’t all a helpless victim” (this=/=victim-blaming, I don’t mean “it was my fault” I mean going through the trauma and on the other side of it. This is re-capturing a sense of agency.)
Maybe you need a story of, “you know, I wouldn’t have even minded, just, why did it have to be *like that*?” Then re-tell your own story in how part of you wish it happened (doesn’t have to be all of you, your rational adult self can still be, you know what, my biggest wish is that this hadn’t happened at all).
The tl;dr: is that we contain contradictions and multitudes and layers and sometimes part of, say, combat PTSD is confronting how much you -enjoyed- violence, confronting who that makes you, etc. Sometimes there’s part of a person that enjoys victimhood–maybe you personally didn’t, but enough people do. People write for so many reasons, their stories serve so many purposes for them. WRITING THESE STORIES CAN BE EMPOWERING FOR SURVIVORS. And you don’t get to tell others they have to recover “correctly” or in the way you think is morally right. There’s no way out but through. Writing these stories can be someone’s “through.” You’ve got no business dictating to them what road they should take to radical self-acceptance.
at the end of the day, when all the censorship debate is over and gone threadbare, we come back to the most important, central issue:
getting rid of stories about sexual abuse will not make real sexual abuse stop happening.
and until sexual abuse stops happening, it’s unfair to demand that stories of sexual abuse stop existing. it’s akin to sweeping a prevalent problem under the rug: if we just don’t say anything, we can pretend it’s gone, right? (except it’s not, and now you’ve silenced the people who most need to be allowed to air out their trauma.)
i'll apple your turnover 